He's said to be fond of sailing...

Edited by author 05-20-2004 09:28 AM
What a popular topic! Mostly with me... oops. (No, wait. I only posted once before. It just feels like more.)

Everyone's tastes vary; perhaps if you were to vouchsafe something that /does/ turn you on, Guy...

As for me, "glamour" models snapped half-nude rarely move me, because usually they don't look like the same species as us, and I suspect they don't really exist. For me, real sex isn't about lace and make-up and high heels[*] and professional poses and the horizontal equivalent of the 100 metre sprint, it's about relaxed cosy comfortable intimacy and a leisurely jog to the paper shop and back. And on the scale of cosy intimacy, seeing up the fair sex's skirt, a privilege which the fair sex usually works very hard to restrict to very close friends, does score fairly high, compared to 95% of the rest of the average day. And we live for the 5%, don't we? ;-)

(Leaving aside the sitcom-style couples whose most intimate shared life-element is the light on the nightstand between the beds...)

Low-level, ordinary-human eroticism is how Ukraine won this year's Eurovision Song Contest by putting on The Louise Jameson Tardis-ettes, and why I'm cheered up whenever the ostensibly ordinary Dove Firmness Soap girls' advertisement is on TV - http://www.dovefirmfriends.co.uk/ , hello girls - even though I don't think it works, or that they're ordinary.

Since I have got fairly clear in my mind the distinction between actual familiarity and inadvertent exposure to voyeurism, and probably since I suffered repeated outrages to my own modesty at boarding school - although my own attitudes during adolescence are embarrassing to look back on, but I have grown up - I don't spend my days trying to look up the skirts or down the shirts of female colleagues, friends, or complete strangers. But it's not so much that I can't understand people who do - as I say, I was a teenager - but that if I imagine it too vividly, maybe the wind will change at that moment and my own psyche will freeze up with that bend there permanently, and I myself will have to buy a mini-camera and a photo album that locks.

As for looking at other people's voyeur photos - well, I suppose you don't risk getting caught.

[*] Heels: this is something else I don't get, but if it amuses other guys, fine. The Joy Of Sex told readers, if your partner has a fetish that you think you can stand, then don't worry, just buy the equipment and have fun. But why on earth do those models wear high-heel shoes /in bed??/ Are there countries where it's illegal to show naked feet, but anything else is fine?? Like in Japan, and fifty years ago in Britain, you could show everything, anything, anywhere, except body hair, anywhere. Shave it off and you're legal. That's probably why, subsequently, some people want to watch the women doing the shaving. Aren't we strange?

But we /are/ strange, and all the weird stuff wouldn't be out there for sale on the Internet if there weren't enough people buying it to turn a profit.

By the way, it now turns out that the mounting-plate of a professional camera tripod is called a shoe, leading to some confusion, and exaggerated search results.

.

Well, I believe people do it! OK? But the question is, how many?

Look, let's not get soft about this! - when you look at an ordinary female human wearing knickers, all you see is an ordinary female human wearing knickers.

To make this erotic requires a woman with an attitude and an ability to pose. Otherwise, it's just dirty underwear. Surely?
Or am I just too innocent to be allowed out?

Edited by author 05-18-2004 07:02 AM
Florida - Man faces second conviction for using shoe camera to look up skirts

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_456023.html

http://www.google.it/search?q=shoe+camera

.

South Koreans are enthusiastic users of camera phones - virtually all new phones there incorporate cameras, typically megapixel or better and many with considerable video capabilities. Acknowledging the potential problems of some clandestine photography the SK government now requires manufacturers to have the phone emit a distinctive noise whenever the camera is used, a far more sensible approach than banning an increasingly popular enhancement.

It's quite reasonable (I think) to say that "covert" photography can be an intrusion; and if it becomes a nuisance, I think it's equally reasonable to say that the Law should make a statement.

What I find hard to judge is how much of a nuisance it really is.

OK, I'm not a chesty 17 year old blonde. So, understandably, nobody has ever followed me around with a camera. But then again, I can't think of anybody who has ever shown me a picture of such... is it really a problem?

Edited by author 05-17-2004 07:12 AM
Do not forget that the Sexual Offences Act 2003 came into force in the UK at the beginning of May 2004, with a penalty of up to 2 years in jail for Voyeurism. The penalty also applies to people who install or operate equipment which allows another person to act voyeuristically:

"2) A person commits an offence if-
(a) he operates equipment with the intention of enabling another person to observe, for the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification, a third person (B) doing a private act, and
(b) he knows that B does not consent to his operating equipment with that intention."

This wording includes mobile phone camera phones and networks and photo blogs.

http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/archives/000268.html

They do it because they can, and because any human activity can be eroticised, even if the majority of the population can't understand it at all.

Ummm regular disclaimers about me ever wanting to do such, etc, etc.